A NOVEL OF CANADIAN
RURAL LIFE
By
ETHEL M. CHAPMAN
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
1922
To
The Memory of a Friend
whose Vision Saw an Arcadia
for Every Field of the Green Country
and
whose Brief Years of Sympathy and Service
were Given to Make it Real for
One Spot in Rural Ontario
God’s Green Country
“Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in their nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the West—
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.”—Mrs. Browning.
Something was wrong—a little more than usual—at the Withers farm.
A spirit of foreboding seemed to hang in the quietness of theuntravelled road past the gate, in the clamorous squeaks of the newlitter of Tamworths in the barnyard, nosing sleepily into theirmother’s side. It seemed to come up from the swamp in the spring